Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

“I was blocks away when the towers fell, and you just can’t imagine what it was like to see the pile of melted metal,” Kimbal said. He had together with his girlfriend early decided to retreat to their friend’s apartment. Kimbal stepped up as a volunteer. “I helped feed the firefighters for six weeks. I was a recent graduate of the French Culinary Institute and they had me peeling potatoes for a week,” Kimbal said. 87

An earthquake devastated the island of Haiti in 2010. To help the poor country, the head of the Artists for Peace and Justice, Bryn Mooser, decided that the organization should build a school and start a baseball team. With him, he wanted to bring Elon to see if he could apply some of his knowledge to help the country. “I want inventors to go down to Haiti. I want geniuses to go down to Haiti,” Mooser said.

“I’ll take you any day you want to go,” he told Elon. “Literally, any day. You’re a hero.”

“How about Christmas Day?” Elon answered. 120

They traveled to a remote village in Haiti far out in the countryside. With the help of Elon’s private jet, they brought 450 toys and 35 MacBook Air laptops. At the Christmas party barbecue, Elon showed the children how to build and light rockets. “I went to Haiti last Christmas and visited some pretty dangerous parts,” Elon said. “I got wasted, too, on some drink they call the Zombie.” 51

After returning from Haiti, Elon met with Dean Kamen, who had invented the Segway. Elon tried to convince him that the best place for Kamen’s next invention, a water purifier, would be Haiti. “[Elon is] really aware of where crises are, and he has a logical way he thinks out problems,” Mooser said. “When he heard about the water purifier, the first thing he said to Dean was, ‘Put it in Haiti.’“ 120

Another result of the trip to Haiti was the documentary Baseball in the time of Cholera , with Elon as the executive producer. The story is as follows: “As a Cholera epidemic rages in Haiti, the United Nations denies it is responsible for introducing the disease despite glaring evidence suggesting Nepalese peacekeepers are to blame. Baseball in the Time of Cholera is the story of a young Haitian boy who plays in Haiti’s first little league baseball team and the Haitian lawyer seeking justice against the UN. As the epidemic spreads, the two stories intersect in the struggle for survival and justice.” 107

A devastating earthquake with a following tsunami hit Japan in 2011. After the close call disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plants, everyone realized that Japan needed other energy sources more suitable for an earthquake zone. The Musk Foundation donated $250 000 to the construction of a solar power system in Soma City, 27 miles [43 km] from the damaged nuclear plants.

To prove the area was safe, sound, and open for business, Elon visited the city and shook hand with Mayor Hidekiyo Tachiya. While the solar panels were manufactured in Japan and installed by local workers, solar power specialists from SolarCity supported the project. “We are grateful to Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation for this generous gift, and for coming such a long way to personally visit Soma City,” Tachiya said. “Recovery requires us to build new industries, and our next generation wants them to be supported by new kinds of energy. With this project as a beginning, Soma City hopes to become a model for Japan’s energy future.” 106

Soma City wasn’t the first solar power project by the Musk Foundation. “We’re looking mostly at the US,” Elon said. “We had also considered Haiti as a good option, but we found difficulties getting the system into the country without getting impounded.”

In 2010, the Musk Foundation decided to build a solar power system for a hurricane response center in Coden, Alabama. The system would provide renewable power to an area devastated by both the Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. The system will generate nearly 100 percent of the electricity needed, and with the help of a backup battery, the system will continue to generate electricity in the event of a power outage. 105

Elon Musk is not the only rocket entrepreneur in the hood. A less public rocket man is John Carmack. Before he began launching rockets, he created the popular computer games Doom and Quake .

A year younger than Elon, many parts from Carmack’s younger life resembled Elon’s. With divorced parents, the young Carmack read books and comics. Like Elon, Carmack had a dark childhood and was bullied in school. After his schoolteacher introduced him to the Apple II computer, Carmack became mesmerized by the computer revolution. He enjoyed playing the games Space Invaders and Asteroids , and he sold his own computer games. 122

Through the new medium Internet, Carmack discovered the different sides of chemical engineering. While both Elon and Carmack used their chemical skills to create rockets, Carmack also used his skills to make explosives so he could steal Apple II computers. But the police caught him and his friends in the act. “Boy behaves like a walking brain with legs… no empathy for other human beings,” was the conclusion of his psychology evaluation. 122

While Elon discovered himself in Canada by coming up with the three things that would affect the world, Carmack discovered himself while serving his sentence in a juvenile home. Carmack realized he didn’t need to steal computers if he could make money by using his programming skills. The eureka moment came when he ported a popular Nintendo video game to the computer.

Carmack worked long days, and he loved the challenge to code the best games. The games were so good that after a concert, the Nine Inch Nails rock star, Trent Reznor, skipped drugs, beer, and women – he wanted to play Doom in his tour bus. As the games sold across the world, Carmack became a wealthy man. While the newly rich Elon bought the Jaguar, Carmack bought a cherry-red Ferrari 328. But everything didn’t go smooth. In a similar way as when Elon forced Martin Eberhard to leave Tesla Motors, Carmack forced one of the co-founders, John Romero, to leave the company they founded. 122

It was after an interview, where Carmack talked about his childhood, he rediscovered his interest in rockets. Carmack began with amateur rockets. “There are people who argue that you can just simulate reality, but I think there’s value in coming out here and dealing with the wind,” he said. “In the information age, the barriers just aren’t there. The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization.” 122

As the weeks passed, Carmack launched larger and more powerful rockets from abandoned parking lots. With the Ferrari as a transportation vehicle, Carmack filled his house with rocket parts. What really interested him was the programming challenges. In a similar way as when he challenged himself to always code the best games, he now wanted to code the best software for the control of the rockets. “You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it,” he said. 122

Carmack read about how people thought NASA had become a trucking company. But he didn’t want to launch a truck – he wanted to launch a dragster into space. In the local amateur rocket website, he searched for members who wanted to build a vertical dragster, as he called his rocket, and thus Armadillo Aerospace was born. The rumors says that one of the reasons why he decided to start a rocket company was because he felt he wasted too much money on buying more and more customized Ferrari cars. At one point he owned four of them, but gave one away as a price in a gaming competition. 122